First Solar Snags Rival Solyndra's Top Scientist

(MoneyWatch)  Top panel maker First Solar just scored an important prestige hire, according to Greentech Media, luring away the chief scientist of Solyndra, a large startup with a different technology but similar market.

The researcher, Markus Beck, helped create Solyndra's distinctive tube-shaped solar arrays. Both First Solar and Solyndra rely on thin-film solar cells, but where the former lays its cadmium telluride-based film in standard flat panels, the latter wraps a copper indium gallium selenide film around an inner core to create a circular shape (for convenience, those chemical bases are abbreviated as CdTe and CIGS, respectively).

In the high-stakes world of thin-film solar, only two things seem relatively certain. One is that First Solar will survive. The company has an early lead, and has already demonstrated that it can reach manufacturing efficiency that make its cells superior in most cases to standard silicon-based photovoltaics.

The other certainty is that many of the other companies currently jostling for space in the market will fade away or be bought out. First Solar's stability would be attractive for any potential hire; the question is whether Becks defected because he feels that Solyndra is in the group of likely failures.

In support of that theory are other departures from Solyndra. Two other scientists also recently left: Ratson Morad, who moved to DayStar Technologies, as well as Benny Buller, who beat Beck to the punch in going to First Solar, and co-founder Jonathan Michael. As a group, the four defections seem to suggest that Solyndra has some serious, possibly insurmountable, technological challenges.

On the other hand, it seems likely that Beck, possibly the hottest commodity of the three, would have left sooner if Solyndra was a dead end. The company has taken almost a billion dollars in funding, including a recent $219 million financing. To offset that amount, it also has over a billion dollars in orders over the next three years. As Greentech Media points out, the company hasn't gotten as much money as it wanted -- but few have, of late.

A possibly more likely explanation is just that Beck is an opportunistic job-hopper who moves on after fulfilling his initial objectives. In support of that theory is his previous migration from Global Solar, one of the first firms to enter the CIGS field. That company is still alive today, and has a product for sale -- it's just not as storied a company as some others in the thin-film field.

Whatever the case, this is an important hire for First Solar. Becks is an expert in CIGS, which offers unique challenges and difficulties for manufacturers. Some of the experience he has acquired during his career will almost certainly help First Solar improve aspects of its own CdTe manufacturing -- assuming the company isn't interested in making CIGS cells, itself.